The MTC Reads selection for Spring 2011 is Having Our Say: The Delany Sister's First 100 Years by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Heath.

This is the remarkable oral history of Sadie and Bessie Delany, two of the ten children born to Henry B.  and Nanny L. Delany. Both Sadie and Bessie were born on the campus of St. Augustine's College in Raleigh, North Carolina.  Their father, a slave freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, was the administrator of St. Augustine's College and later became America's first elected black Episcopal bishop.

Sarah Delany received her both her bachelor's and master's degrees from Teachers College at Columbia University and was New York City's first black home economics teacher at the high school level. Bessie received her doctor of dental surgery degree from Columbia University and was only the second black woman to practice dentistry in the state of  New York.

Dr. Elizabeth Delany, Bessie, died at the age of 104 in 1995; and her sister, Sarah Delany, Sadie, dies in 1999, at the age of 109.

Read their story in their words as they take you back to the post-Reconstruction South and Harlem's Golden Age.